Load Testing with JMeter Docker and AWS EC2

If you have an application or e-commerce site (or any site for that matter), it’s not uncommon that you would expect a higher level of traffic on certain days, like Black Friday.
At moments like these, we need to take our load tests to the next level and simulate larger numbers of concurrent users. If we are running our load tests locally with Apache JMeter™,
there are certain limitations to the number of users you can run, even if your computer has enough CPU and memory.To generate the heavy load by jmeter we run it in distributed mode.

Apache JMeter, an open source testing tool, is used for load testing, performance testing, and functional testing.

Challenges with Distributed Testing

When we talk about distributing JMeter, we refer to a Master-Slave architecture where JMeter uses Java RMI [Remote Method Invocation] to interact with objects in a distributed network. You can see this in the image below.

For a detailed description of a JMeter distributed testing setup and its usage, read the blog post here. But the setup for distributed testing is a complex ,time consuming and error-prone procedure, based on the properties file and the command line. So why not to drastically reduce the setup complexity, by using Docker?

Why docker and AWS EC2?

To reduce setup complexity for distributed testing in JMeter.
To remove error-prone procedure based on the properties file and the command line.
To reduce the cost of infrastructure by using AWS EC2 instances for Master and Slaves machine which is pay-per-use kind of model which you can scale whenever you want.
Location independence ,testing from different geographical location.
Stimulating load tests containing numerous concurrent users from different geographies.

Before we start the hands on through this tutorial ,to understand distributed testing using docker refer this. We are using same approach here but with AWS EC2 instance.

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Before we start the hands on through this tutorial ,to understand distributed testing using docker refer this. We are using same approach here but with AWS EC2 instance.

Infrastructure of Setup

We are going to create a distributed load testing infrastructure using AWS EC2, Docker and JMeter. Infrastructure will look like below:

The whole setup is divided into 2 parts ,Docker Images setup and AWS setup.

First we will create our own custom JMeter docker files as per our requirement then create images from the docker files and push them on docker hub to reuse them anytime anywhere.